Iain Martin is a political commentator, and a former editor of The Scotsman and former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the men who blew up the British economy, published by Simon & Schuster.. As well as this blog, he writes a column for The Sunday Telegraph. You can read more about Iain by visiting his website

Eastleigh by-election: Cameron is very close to being stuffed

By-elections do not decide general elections. It's mid-term. It's a protest vote, etc. But my goodness, what a result in Eastleigh. What do the Lib Dems have to do to lose? Start murdering each other? Start murdering voters? Their stunning victory in this contest despite the Rennard scandal means Nick Clegg is back in business. The Deputy Prime Minister can claim that he has weathered the worst of coalition. Now, incredibly, he can push on to 2015.

And well done Ukip, whose surge sneaked it for the Lib Dems in Eastleigh. Britain is another step closer to getting a Europhile government after 2015, in the shape of a Lab/Lib coalition or outright Labour majority. As I pointed out before the result, the centre-Right being divided is calamitous for David Cameron and his party. Ukip only needs to get five or six per cent in a general election to cause chaos.

This was all pretty predictable from the moment the Tory modernisers made their elementary strategic error. They forgot that first you should attempt to lock in and secure your core, and then build out support from there.

In contrast, the Tory leadership's strategy of the last three years – involving an incoherent, botched general election campaign and assault after assault on their own voters – has been disastrous. As a liberal Conservative of long experience put it when I ran into him the other day, many Tories out in the country have simply had it with this lot. Piling millions more into 40p tax, abandoning the pledge on inheritance tax and banging on about gay marriage leaves a lot of core Tories outside London wondering what on earth the point of the Tory party is. The "they have nowhere else to go" view turns out to be wrong. They can vote Ukip.

At the turn of the year I wrote that Cameron can still, just, win in 2015. His party conference speech last autumn was his best to date. His Europe speech was artful and created a policy that Tories can unite around in several years time. But a window of opportunity which was just ajar is closing. After the humiliation of Eastleigh, and with Ukip on his tail, it becomes increasingly difficult to see how Cameron might rescue the situation.